Burnt Shadows Part 6

He touched the grotesque darkness below her shoulder blade tentatively, fearfully as though it were a relic of h.e.l.l, clamping his teeth together against the outrage of the lumps his fingers encountered. She couldn't feel his hand, but the warmth of his breath on her neck was enough to set off another shudder, one that rippled all the way inside her.

He closed his eyes and moved his hand to where the skin felt as skin should. This time when her body shook in a way that he knew was devoid of fear his own body responded; there was no s.p.a.ce in this moment of intimacy for him to feel any mortification. He ran the back of his hand along her shoulders, down the curves of her to her waist, reminding her there was this, too, these parts of her also.

Seconds pa.s.sed as she allowed herself the luxury of his touch, knowing this memory would join Konrad's kisses to form the entirety of her experience of physical intimacy.

'You don't have to be so kind,' she said at length, her hands fisting in the material on to which they still held. 'I know how ugly they are.'

'Ugly? No.' If his voice hadn't been so gentle she might have believed him. 'Birdback,' he said, resting his palm against the middle burn, his other hand swiftly wiping away his tears. 'Don't you know everything about you is beautiful?'

She swung to face him, anger bringing unfamiliarity to her face, forcing him to recognise how he had etched each of her everyday expressions into his mind to keep him company in the hours he was away from her.

'The bomb did nothing beautiful.' Her fist thumped against his chest as she spoke. 'Do you understand me? It did nothing beautiful.'

Elizabeth Burton, who had been woken at dawn by self-loathing, heard the shouts as she was about to sit down at her writing desk. Racing forward, she threw open the shutters to the verandah just in time to see Hiroko in a state of partial undress, yelling and pummelling Sajjad, whose trousers did nothing to hide his erection.

8.

There was nowhere in the world more beautiful than Mus soorie, Elizabeth Burton thought, standing at the top of her garden slope, watching either mist or cloud cling to the white peaks of the Himalayas in the distance while the scent of pine forests drifted down from the top of the hill on which the Burton cottage nestled. What a pity beauty could be so meaningless.

Although, she conceded, walking towards the old oak tree, however bad things were here they would have been worse in Delhi with the stifling June heat even worse than usual this year, she'd read in the paper this morning. And other than that heat, well, yes, other than that heat there was that matter of Sajjad. As much as she shared James's dismay about the just-announced British decision to pull out of India by mid-August instead of the following year a decision which effectively put an end to any chance of a semblance of order to Part.i.tion there was a part of her which hoped that by some miracle Sajjad would choose Pakistan and be gone from all their lives by the time they returned to Delhi in October. Even though they'd only be there long enough to pack up and leave India there was still so much that could happen oh, why hide from the truth: the thought of seeing Sajjad again embarra.s.sed her.

It still made her queasy to recall that morning in April when she'd stumbled on to that awful scene between Hiroko and Sajjad. She'd leapt to the worst possible conclusion she would be the first to acknowledge it and yelled such horrible things at Sajjad as she ordered him out of her house. She still had no memory of how Hiroko had reacted, had only been slightly aware at the time that the girl was fumbling to b.u.t.ton her blouse as Sajjad almost tripped over his feet in leaving.

Once he was gone, Elizabeth had tried to speak gently to Hiroko, but the younger woman had burst into tears and locked herself in her bathroom, from where she refused to respond to Elizabeth's requests which soon became demands that she open the door.

Elizabeth had finally gone upstairs to wake James, who had miraculously slept through all the shouting.

'If he's tried to do what I think you're not going to stop me from sending the police after him,' she'd said, shaking James awake. Her husband looked at her with a confusion that would have been comical under most circ.u.mstances. 'Sajjad. Your blue-eyed boy. I just found him downstairs with Hiroko.'

'The verandah's getting too hot for their lessons,' James said sleepily, pulling himself into a seated position. 'I should tell them to use my study.'

'She was practically naked, fighting to keep him off her. Stop blinking at me, James. He was quite visibly aroused. Do you want me to draw you a diagram?'

With a curse she'd never heard from him before, James was on his feet, reaching for his dressing gown and bellowing, 'Sajjad!'

'He's gone. I threw him out.'

'I'll chase him down in the car.' He slammed the flat of his hand against the door to push it open, the sound of flesh smacking wood violent and painful. Elizabeth's hands lifted in self-defence to shield her face.

Sajjad. He had practically lived in this house. And it had never once crossed her mind that he could be any kind of threat, not in that way. Before the thought was done she knew she'd made some terrible mistake.

'James!' she called out.

At the same moment James re-entered the room.

'Are you sure?' he said. 'Elizabeth, how is it possible?'

She went over and took his hand, reminded of the moment when they'd been told that Henry had thrown a rock at a native girl and blinded her in one eye. It turned out later to have been another Henry Henry Williams, a thuggish child even at five and James and Elizabeth both believed they had pa.s.sed some parenting test when they'd refused to accept their son was responsible.

Hand in hand they walked downstairs, where Hiroko was exiting her room to find them.

'I'm sorry. It was my fault. I undid my b.u.t.tons. I made him look at me. He was only trying to be kind. Please. I tried to tell him things I wasn't ready to tell anyone. I'm sorry. I'll leave your house. Please don't punish him. I'm so sorry.'

There was much in there Elizabeth didn't understand, but she did understand enough to know what must be done.

'We'll all leave together. It's time to go to Mussoorie for the summer. Pack quickly, Hiroko. We'll leave by the next train. James, will you send Lala Buksh to Sajjad's house with his severance pay. Make sure he tells Sajjad that you'll give him a reference for whatever employment he finds next.'

And so here they were in Mussoorie, most beautiful and romantic of India's hill stations. She stopped again to look at the extraordinary view; soon the monsoons would cause much of the vista to disappear amidst rain and mist, so while she could she intended to gaze and gaze at all the beauty on offer in this demi-paradise. She didn't know how she would have survived India without Mussoorie, where the official air of Delhi was cast off (or rather, sent off to Simla, the summer capital of the Raj) and the rides to Gun Hill, the picnics by waterfalls, the dances at the Savoy all made the world a kind of dream, even during the war years. She had expected or perhaps just hoped that Mussoorie would have the same revivifying effect on Hiroko as it always did on her, but if anything the joie de vivre and romance of the place seemed only to draw her further into whatever self-enclosed s.p.a.ce she had entered that day in Delhi.

Elizabeth stood at the base of the oak tree, and looked up at Hiroko, curled on a branch with her back against the trunk, her white linen trousers ripped at the shin from a previous scramble up to this favoured spot. Elizabeth still didn't know which of their neighbours had subsequently hung this rope ladder from the branch on which Hiroko liked to sit, though she suspected it was Kamran Ali, who had the cottage next door.

'I'm coming up,' Elizabeth said, and began to ascend the rope ladder.

Hiroko felt the slight dip of the branch as Elizabeth pulled herself up from the final rung and dangled both legs off one side of the branch, but she said nothing, just continued to look out over the ridges of hills, carpeted with forests and flowers and cottages. On one of the few occasions she'd given in to Elizabeth's pleas to leave the Burton property she'd met a retired English general on the Mall, who said she must recognise so much of the flora here Mussoorie was just south of the Sino-j.a.panese phytogeographical ('I mean, pertaining to floral life') region. That evening he'd sent his driver over to the Burton cottage with an abundance of flowers from the surrounding hills, and it was not just their familiarity that made her want to weep but the fact that she did not know their j.a.panese names, and there was no one she could turn to for that information.

Each day, sitting in this tree, eyes drifting over Mussoorie's trees and flowers, some as familiar as the texture of tatami beneath her feet, she strung together different memories of Nagasaki as though they were rosary beads: the faint sound of her father preparing paint on his ink stone, the deepening purple of a sky studded by cl.u.s.ters and constellations of light in an evening filled with the familiar tones of her neighbours' voices, the schoolchildren rising to their feet as she entered the cla.s.sroom, the walks along the Oura with Konrad, dreaming of all that would be possible after the war . . .

Everyone in India was talking about the future the English planning their return to England, Kamran Ali receiving daily telegrams from his cousins already in Karachi regarding property and prospects and family divisions, and Lala Buksh had just sent a message from Delhi to say he would be gone to Pakistan before the Burtons returned. Hiroko could not find a place for herself in any talk of tomorrow so instead she found herself, for the first time in her life, looking back and further back. The Burtons' set seemed to have decided to make up for the shortfall of her imagination by proffering possible futures to her: travelling companion . . . governess . . . secretary . . . young wife to lonely widower. And Elizabeth just said you'll come with us, of course, her voice revealing that she understood that sounded more like a threat than a promise. And beneath all this was the voice which said, j.a.pan. In the end you will go back.

'Yes, I think it must have been Kamran Ali who you have to thank for the rope ladder,' Elizabeth said.

Hiroko kept her eyes turned away from Elizabeth. She owed the Burtons so much. How had she allowed herself to owe the Burtons so much?

Elizabeth's thin cotton dress provided little protection from the roughness of the bark she was sitting on, and there was an annoying branch tickling the top of her head, no matter how she angled her face.

'Enough,' she said. 'I've had enough of your moping.'

'Sorry,' Hiroko said dully.

'Say it. Just say it,' Elizabeth demanded.

'Say what?'

'Sajjad. You're angry with me about Sajjad.'

'Am I?' She thought about it. 'Yes, I suppose I am. More angry at myself for giving you the excuse you wanted to get rid of him.' The futility of her pleas for Sajjad to be absolved of any wrongdoing had taught her precisely her role in the Burton house.

'No good would have come of it. One day you'll see that.'

'Come of what?'

'You and Sajjad. How you felt about each other. It was impossible. His world is so alien to yours.'

Hiroko finally turned to look at Elizabeth, trying to make sense of her words. Light filtered through the leaves, everything so beautiful she recalled Konrad saying the Garden of Eden would never have had a story of its own if it hadn't contained a serpent. And then she understood.

'You think . . . you sent him away because you think he . . . that there is something inappropriate about our friendship.'

'Yes,' Elizabeth said, with a lift of her chin. 'One day you'll see that I acted in your best interests.' She caught hold of Hiroko's hand. 'His is a world you either grow up in or to which you remain for ever an outsider. And maybe he'd give up that world for you if that's what it took to have you in his life but when that first intensity of pa.s.sion pa.s.sed, he'd regret it, and he'd blame you. Women enter their husbands' lives, Hiroko all around the world. It doesn't happen the other way round. We are the ones who adapt. Not them. They don't know how to do it. They don't see why they should do it.'

Hiroko could only stare at Elizabeth. 'Intensity of pa.s.sion'? This Englishwoman was crazy.

But what if she wasn't?

Hiroko reached back to a place between burns where he had touched her. He had wanted her. Despite the birds. The blood rushed to her cheeks as she finally understood the strange lift of the fabric of his trousers. He had wanted her and she . . . she had wanted him to go on touching her. Everywhere. She covered her face with her hands, and Elizabeth saw that the woman beside her was just a child.

'Hiroko, it's impossible.'

Hiroko spread her fingers apart to glare through them at Elizabeth.

'Your marriage has just made you bitter. And resentful.'

It was a relief finally to be held accountable.

'Perhaps. It's certainly true that I'm jealous of Sajjad. I'm jealous of the fact that everyone I love loves him more than me, and I resent the fact that I'm the only person in the world whose love he's never been interested in. There, I've said it.'

Hiroko raised her eyebrows, unsure what to make of this.

'Is that a relief?'

'G.o.d, yes.' Elizabeth cupped her hands over her mouth and exhaled deeply. 'G.o.d in heaven, yes it is. Oh.' She crossed her hands over her chest. 'My goodness. What strange things we humans are.'

Hiroko couldn't help but laugh.

'Don't implicate all of us in this. Your strangeness is entirely your own.'

They were friends again now. Elizabeth moved closer to Hiroko on the branch.

'What I've said doesn't change the fact that you don't belong in his world.'

Hiroko was silent for a long time.

'I don't belong in your world either.' She tilted her head thoughtfully, and stopped being a girl. 'You just gave me something valuable. The belief that there are worthwhile things still to be found. All I've been doing all this while is thinking of losses. So much lost. I keep thinking of Nagasaki. You said to me once that Delhi must seem so strange and unfamiliar, but nothing in the world could ever be more unfamiliar than my home that day. That unspeakable day. Literally unspeakable. I don't know the words in any language . . . My father, Ilse. I saw him in the last seconds of his life, and I thought he was something unhuman. He was covered in scales. No skin, no hair, no clothes, just scales. No one, no one in the world should ever have to see their father covered in scales.'

Elizabeth gripped Hiroko's hand and brought it to her lips.

'And the thing is, I still don't understand. Why did they have to do it? Why a second bomb? Even the first is beyond anything I can . . . but a second. You do that, and see what you've done, and then you do it again. How is that . . .? Do you know they were going to bomb Kokura that day instead? But it was cloudy so they had to turn around to their second target Nagasaki. And it was cloudy there, too. I remember the clouds that day so well. They almost gave up. So close to giving up, and then they saw a break in the cloud. And boom.' She said the 'boom' so softly it was little more than an exhalation.

'I always planned on leaving Nagasaki, you know. I was never sentimental about it. But until you see a place you've known your whole life reduced to ash you don't realise how much we crave familiarity. Do you see those flowers on that hillside, Ilse? I want to know their names in j.a.panese. I want to hear j.a.panese. I want tea that tastes the way tea should taste in my understanding of tea. I want to look like the people around me. I want people to disapprove when I break the rules and not simply to think that I don't know better. I want doors to slide open instead of swinging open. I want all those things that never meant anything, that still wouldn't mean anything if I hadn't lost them. You see, I know that. I know that but it doesn't stop my wanting them. I want to see Urakami Cathedral. I used to think it ruined the view, never liked it. But now I want to see Urakami Cathedral, I want to hear its bells ringing. I want to smell cherry blossom burning. I want to feel my body move with the motion of being on a street-car. I want to live between hills and sea. I want to eat kasutera.'

Want. Elizabeth heard the repet.i.tion of the word and knew what religious conversion must feel like. Want Want. She remembered that, dimly. Somewhere. Want Want. At what point had her life become an acc.u.mulation of things she didn't want? She didn't want Henry to be away. She didn't want to be married to a man she no longer knew how to talk to. She didn't want to keep hidden the fact that at times during the war and especially when Berlin was firebombed she had felt entirely German. She didn't want to agree that the British had come to the end of a good innings. She didn't want to go back to London and live under the shadow of her meddling mother-in-law. She didn't want to make James unhappy through her inability to be the woman he had thought she would turn into, given time and instruction. She didn't want to be undesired. She didn't want her future to look anything like her present. She gripped the branch, feeling suddenly dizzy, and tried to concentrate on what Hiroko was saying.

'But should I tell you what I don't want? I don't want to go back to Nagasaki. Or to j.a.pan. I don't want to hide these burns on my back, but I don't want people to judge me by them either. Hibakusha. I hate that word. It reduces you to the bomb. Every atom of you. So now I have to find something different to want, Elizabeth. And I'm sorry you've been so kind, so incredibly generous but moving to London with you and James, that's not it. That's not what I want.'

'What do you want?'

'I don't know. Maybe . . . Sajjad.' She said it as though testing the statement.

As gently as her voice would allow, and despite everything she had just been thinking about her own life, Elizabeth said, 'You must find a way to let go of that. His family . . .'

Those last two words sank into Hiroko's stomach with a terrible weight.

'I know. You're right. I know.' She closed her eyes and rested her head on her knees.

9.

The morning after they buried Khadija Ashraf her four sons and son-in-law walked single file across the courtyard of the Jama Masjid, following behind an old man who drizzled water on to the ground from a bucket to cool the baking stones. The old man was an ascetic Sufi who for years now had been watering the sandstone for the recently bereaved who walked across the courtyard. Every evening he sc.r.a.ped the dead skin off his soles to ensure his own feet would not become hardened against the pain of the burning ground he would have to endure, then overcome, suffering through purely spiritual paths. Khadija Ashraf had always disapproved of such thinking. 'It's the Christians who believe we were put on earth to suffer. But Muslims know that Allah the Beneficent, the Merciful forgave Adam and Eve their temptation.' And then she pointed an accusing finger at the sky. 'And so you should have it was you, not the Snake, who tempted them by making a fruit forbidden.'

Who is this G.o.d of the Ascetics who wants to be reached through deprivation? Sajjad repeated his mother's words to himself, his lips moving soundlessly.

With her dying breath, Khadija Ashraf had whispered in his ear the ritual salutation from elder to younger 'Keep on living' and now the only way in which he could bear her loss was to believe some part of her soul had entered him with that breath and now nestled against his heart. That he didn't really believe such things in no way prevented him from taking comfort in the thought. In some way, he knew, she was within him airing her opinions, chiding him, making him laugh.

Without a word, he turned away from the water-dappled path and veered towards the pillared corridor that ran along the perimeter of the courtyard. Stepping through an archway into the corridor, he received the coolness of the shaded stone with grat.i.tude. He heard his eldest brother, Altamash, call out to him, but merely responded with a wave of his fingers to indicate they should go on alone, and wrapped his arm around a pillar, his fingers strumming its ridges as he looked towards the Red Fort. Dilli. My Dilli. But today it was absence, not belonging, that the Old City echoed back at him.

'Sajjad, come home with us.' It was his brother-in-law speaking. 'Your sister and I will be leaving this afternoon, and there are things we have to talk about before we go.'

'I'll be there soon,' he replied, not looking back at the men of his family who stood behind his back like a phalanx of guards.

'If there are things to talk about, talk about them now,' his brother Iqbal said. 'I'm going to say goodbye when we leave here. I'm engaged for the rest of the day.'

'I told your sister we'd talk about it when the whole family is gathered. Can't you delay your business, Iqbal?'

'No.'

Altamash made a noise of disgust. For years now it had been common knowledge in the moholla that Iqbal had taken one of the Old City's courtesans as his mistress.

'You think we don't all know what your business is? You have no shame. The one promise you made to our mother was that you would always come home to your wife before midnight, and the first night she is gone from us you stay out until dawn.'

'She is threatening to go to Pakistan,' Iqbal said. They didn't need to ask who 'she' was. 'I told her last night I will do whatever I must to keep her here.'

Sajjad turned around.

'You threatened this woman you claim to love?'

'I didn't threaten her. I promised to marry her.'

With a curse, Altamash caught his brother by the arm.